Susan Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling'

This is the Preface to Susan Neiman's acclaimed study in moral philosophy, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). Links to reviews are available at the bottom of the page

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. 

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #129

'Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questions about what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it. Those questions will quickly become historical. For what most demands explanation is not how moral judgments are justified, but why those that are so clearly justified were disregarded in the past. When one begins to seek explanation, one can end in anything from myth, like the Fall, to metaphysics, like Hegel's Phenomenology. What's important is that the place one begins is perfectly ordinary... I believe it is the place where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop. For it involves questions more natural, urgent, and pervasive than the sceptical epistemological quandaries conventionally said to drive modern philosophy..'

The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today. How much weight can a brute reference carry? It takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that make civilization possible. Learning this, modern readers may feel wistful: lucky the age to which an earthquake can do so much damage. The 1755 earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon, and several thousand of its inhabitants, shook the Enlightenment all the way to East Prussia, where an unknown minor scholar named Immanuel Kant wrote three essays on the nature of earthquakes for the Konigsberg newspaper. He was not alone. The reaction to the earthquake was as broad as it was swift. Voltaire and Rousseau found another occasion to quarrel over it, academies across Europe devoted prize essay contests to it, and the six-year-old Goethe, according to several sources, was brought to doubt and consciousness for the first time. The earthquake affected the best minds in Europe, but it wasn't confined to them. Popular reactions ranged from sermons to eyewitness sketches to very bad poetry. Their number was so great as to cause sighs in the contemporary press and sardonic remarks from Frederick the Great, who thought the cancellation of carnival preparations months after the disaster to be overdone.

Auschwitz, by contrast, evoked relative reticence. Philosophers were stunned, and on the view most famously formulated by Adorno, silence is the only civilized response. In 1945 Arendt wrote that the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe, but even there her prediction was not quite right. No major philosophical work but Arendt's own appeared on the subject in English, and German and French texts were remarkably oblique. Historical reports and eyewitness testimony appeared in unprecedented volume, but conceptual reflection has been slow in coming.

It cannot be the case that philosophers failed to notice an event of this magnitude. On the contrary, one reason given for the absence of philosophical reflection is the magnitude of the task. What occurred in Nazi death camps was so absolutely evil that, like no other event in human history, it defies human capacities for understanding. But the question of the uniqueness and magnitude of Auschwitz is itself a philosophical one; thinking about it could take us to Kant and Hegel, Dostoevsky and Job. One need not settle questions about the relationship of Auschwitz to other crimes and suffering to take it as paradigmatic of the sort of evil that contemporary philosophy rarely examines. The differences in intellectual responses to the earthquake at Lisbon and the mass murder at Auschwitz are differences not only in the nature of the events but also in our intellectual constellations. What counts as a philosophical problem and what counts as a philosophical reaction, what is urgent and what is academic, what is a matter of memory and what is a matter of meaning - all these are open to change.

This book traces changes that have occurred in our understanding of the self and its place in the world from the early Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Taking intellectual reactions to Lisbon and Auschwitz as central poles of inquiry is a way of locating the beginning and end of the modern. Focusing on points of doubt and crisis allows us to examine our guiding assumptions by examining what challenges them at points where they break down: what threatens our sense of the sense of the world? That focus also underlies one of this book's central claims: the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought. Most contemporary versions of the history of philosophy will view this claim to be less false than incomprehensible. For the problem of evil is thought to be a theological one. Classically, it's formulated as the question: How could a good God create a world full of innocent suffering? 

Such questions have been off-limits to philosophy since Immanuel Kant argued that God, along with many other subjects of classical metaphysics, exceeded the limits of human knowledge. If one thing might seem to unite philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, it's the conviction that Kant's work proscribes not just future philosophical references to God but most other sorts of foundation as well. From this perspective, comparing Lisbon to Auschwitz is merely mistaken. The mistake seems to lie in accepting the eighteenth century's use of the word evil to refer to both acts of human cruelty and instances of human suffering. That mistake might come naturally to a group of theists, who were willing to give God the responsibility for both, but it shouldn't confuse the rest of us. On this view Lisbon and Auschwitz are two completely different kinds of events. Lisbon denotes the sort of thing insurance companies call natural disasters, to remove them from the sphere of human action.

Thus human beings are absolved of responsibility not only for causing or compensating them but even for thinking about them, except in pragmatic and technological terms. Earthquakes and volcanoes, famines and floods inhabit the borders of human meaning. We want to understand just so much about them as might help us gain control. Only traditional - that is, premodern - theists will seek in them significance. Auschwitz, by contrast, stands for all that is meant when we use the word evil today: absolute wrongdoing that leaves no room for account or expiation.

Initially, then, no two events will strike us as more different. If there's a problem of evil engendered by Lisbon, it can occur only for the orthodox: how can God allow a natural order that causes innocent suffering? The problem of evil posed by Auschwitz looks like another entirely: how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms? It is just this sense that the problems are utterly different which marks modern consciousness. The sharp distinction between natural and moral evil that now seems self-evident was born around the Lisbon earthquake and nourished by Rousseau. Tracing the history of that distinction, and the ways in which the problems refused to stay separate, is one aim of this book.

A central reason for locating the modern as beginning at Lisbon is precisely for its attempt to divide responsibility clearly. Close look at that attempt will reveal all its irony. Though the philosophes perpetually accused Rousseau of nostalgia, Voltaire's discussion of the earthquake left far more in God's hands than did Rousseau's. And when Rousseau invented the modern sciences of history and psychology to cope with questions the earthquake brought to the surface, it was in defense of God's order. Ironies notwithstanding, the consciousness that emerged after Lisbon was an attempt at maturity. If Enlightenment is the courage to think for oneself, it's also the courage to assume responsibility for the world into which one is thrown. Radically separating what earlier ages called natural from moral evils was thus part of the meaning of modernity. If Auschwitz can be said to mark its ending, it is for the way it marks our terror. Modern conceptions of evil were developed in the attempt to stop blaming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own. The more responsibility for evil was left to the human, the less worthy the species seemed to take it on. We are left without direction. Returning to intellectual tutelage isn't an option for many, but hopes for growing up now seem void.

The history of philosophy, like that of nations or individuals, should teach us not to take for granted the intersection of assumptions where we find ourselves standing at particular moments in time. Learning this is a crucial part of the self-knowledge that was always philosophy's goal. But history of philosophy achieves such knowledge only when it is sufficiently historical. More often, the history of philosophy is approached as if our constellations and categories were self-evident. In broadest terms, we probably agree with Comte's view of intellectual history as progressing from theological to metaphysical to scientific ages. On such a view, thinkers whose world was shattered by the Lisbon earthquake would confirm all conviction in Enlightenment naiveté. At best, their reaction seems quaint, a sign of intellectual immaturity befitting an era that found itself on the border between theology an metaphysics. If one believes the world is ruled by a good an powerful father figure, it's natural to expect his order to be comprehensibly just. Jettison that belief, and whatever expectations remain are unresolved residues of childish fantasy. Thus the intellectual shock waves generated by Lisbon, when noticed at all, are seen as the birth pangs of a sadder but wiser era that has learned to live on its own.

This view, I will argue, is itself a historical one, for nothing is easier than stating the problem of evil in nontheist terms. One can state it, for example, as an argument with Hegel: not only is the real not identical with the rational; they aren't even related. To make this observation, you need no theory. Any observation of the world that continues for more than a couple of minutes should do. Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questions about what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it. Those questions will quickly become historical. For what most demands explanation is not how moral judgments are justified, but why those that are so clearly justified were disregarded in the past. When one begins to seek explanation, one can end in anything from myth, like the Fall, to metaphysics, like Hegel's Phenomenology. WhatÕs important is that the place one begins is perfectly ordinary.

I believe it is the place where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop. For it involves questions more natural, urgent, and pervasive than the sceptical epistemological quandaries conventionally said to drive modern philosophy. ..

read more: http://www.susan-neiman.de/docs/b_preface.html

Reviews: 

Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2002
NYTimes, 5 October 2002
NYTimes, 6 October 2002
Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 2002
Milliyet, 24 October 2002
NRC Handelsblad, 8 November 2002
Die Welt, 14 December 2002
Washington Post, 15 December 2002
First Things, January 2003
Forward, 28 March 2003
Culture Wars, 02/2003
Common Knowledge, Spring 2003
Filosofie Magazine, April 2003
Christian Century, April 5, 2003
CHOICE, June 2003
Weekly Standard, 9 June 2003
New York Review of Books, 12 June 2003 
Galileu, Número 149, Decembro 2003 
Harper's Magazine, January 2004 
literaturkritik.de, Nr.7, Juli 2004 
Freitag 34, 13.August 2004
The Globe and Mail, 11. September 2004

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Susan Neiman: Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling (Keynote address at the 50th anniversary conference): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBhhkAcmrlg

Read the transcript 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling'

50 Years On, A Seminal Work Is Alive and Debated
Fifty years after its publication, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann In Jerusalem is as relevant and controversial as ever. During a standing room only event, a distinguished panel and members of the audience debated its journalistic and philosophical merits at the Columbia Journalism School. Includes full video

Eichmann in Jerusalem's 50th anniversary:

In the trial, Eichmann presented himself merely as a civil servant for the Third Reich, following orders to deport millions to concentration camps at the behest of the Nazi leadership. He presented himself as a moral individual operating under the Kantian categorical imperative (whereas the moral law coincided with the law of his state, therefore, Hitler was the legislator of his morality). He professed no ideological or psychological allegiance to the ideas of Hitler. Nonetheless, in the end, he was sentenced to death. But Arendt observed in Eichmann a somewhat pathetic figure, unintelligent and weak-willed, and drew from this her concept of the "banality of evil", in which ordinary individuals can commit great acts of evil in the name of doing their duty or following the law.

The book was controversial for what seemed to be an almost sympathetic portrayal of a reviled figure, and later research and documents, such as Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem   have revealed that Eichmann was fully in support of the genocide he enacted. Some critics would argue that this evidence invalidates Arendt's entire thesis, but in many texts and lectures, especially those at this conference, maintain that Arendt's ideas remain as pertinent as ever. Arendt questioned how intention functioned under totalitarian violence, and criticized its disappearance under such conditions. Moral choice remained an imperative, moreover, a universal imperative, unlike Eichamann's misinterpretation of Kant, which implied the subject in an international plurality. In writing about Eichmann, Arendt observed the larger historical world's disappearance into non-thinking and banality, and suggested new modes of moral philosophy as they related to international law. Even more deeply, it brings into question the role of thought in these "banal" procedures...

http://pyxisjournal.com/new-blog/2013/9/28/an-introduction-first-thoughts-from-the-eichmann-in-jerusalem-conference

Also see:

Closing the Circle: article on Revolution in Frontier
Upinder Singh: On the Politics of War and Violence in Early Medieval India

Ignorance is Strength - Freedom is Slavery - War is Peace

The Abyss of Modernity: Questioning Political Violence

The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism

John Mack: The Enemy System

John Horgan on erasing war from the human condition

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus

Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'

When Charles Chaplin Became the Enemy

"It's all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify. Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; Monsieur Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business."